Five artists from across the world have arrived in Belfast to present their work entitled CAUTION at Golden Thread Gallery from tomorrow (24 August 2012) as part of the London 2012 Festival. 

The artists from Peru, Canada, Japan, and Iraq have been collaborating for more than a year with Northern Ireland based artist Sinéad O’Donnell on CAUTION, a series of solo and collaborative performances, video works, still images and installations that seek to re-frame their artistic identities within an ongoing discourse about invisible disability.

During 2011 Sinéad, the lead artist and curator on the project, visited each artist and worked with them to produce material that explored invisibility, materiality and states in-between.

“The process was cumulative and each artist built upon ideas generated by previous encounters and journeys with me connecting the artists and acting as a catalyst for the progression of the work,” said Sinéad.  “Through this series of meetings, actions and correspondences across continents, CAUTION has navigated between the national and international, the personal and political, the structured and the shattered, to give the artists space to explore their limits, break through boundaries and work with the extremes of their abilities to communicate and make things happen.”

Intrinsic to the exhibition at Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery is a programme of performances, talks and interpretation at the gallery and other locations in the city. CAUTION will also be presented as part of Unlimited, a showcase of extraordinary new work by deaf and disabled artists at the Southbank Centre in London during the Paralympic Games.

Each artist has been allocated their own space in the gallery. In Poshya Kakil’s area, the sounds and smells of her home town of Erbil in Kurdistan-Iraq are brought vividly to life. Sylvette Babin plays with repetition and absurd, slightly comical, situations in films shot in Montreal and displayed on a series of screens in the gallery. Paul Couillard, from Toronto, will set up his own laboratory and invite the audience to observe his experiments in a darkened room at the very back of the gallery. Japanese artist, Shiro Masuyama, plays with our perceptions of space in a mix of sculpture and film work while Mariel Carranza creates an environment which references the mountains of her native Peru.

“I will be resident in the gallery for the entire exhibition, sifting, archiving and showing visitors materials and information I gathered during the project and trying to make sense of our world and my identity within it - both individually and as part of a series of diverse communities,” said Sinéad.  “Contemporary art is not accessible to everybody and, as we’d like to open up a discussion about the work in a friendly and approachable way, gallery guides will be on hand to answer questions throughout the exhibition.”

According to Cian Smyth, London 2012 Creative Programmer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, getting all of the artists together in Northern Ireland is something of a coup: “CAUTION is a very ambitious project that has risen to the occasion of the Paralympic Games. The Games represent a celebration of human endeavor amongst the world’s best disabled athletes. What we wanted to recognise is the same endeavor by our best disabled and deaf artists and challenge perceptions of disability on a global stage. Sinead has managed to not only bring some of the best performance artists from around the world to Belfast for a unique exhibition but also deliver a work that asks us what we really think about disability by exploring ideas around disabilities that are invisible or not necessarily physical.”

The exhibition opens at Golden Thread Gallery on Friday 24 August and runs until Saturday 29 September.

CAUTION is produced by Artsadmin www.artsadmin.co.uk

ENDSNotes to editorsA full programme of events with access details is attached.

Artsadmin is based at Toynbee Studios and is a unique producing and presenting organisation for contemporary artists working in theatre, dance, live art, visual arts and mixed media, also offering various support services for artists, including a free advisory service, mentoring and development programmes and a number of bursary schemes. Toynbee Studios is Artsadmin’s unique centre for the development and  presentation of new work.  artsadmin.co.uk

Artists’ biographiesSinéad O’Donnell is a young artist originally from Dublin and based in Belfast whose work explores identity mainly through encounters with territory and the territorial. She studied fine art at the University of Ulster, textiles in Dublin and visual performance and time-based practices at Dartington College of Arts in England. Her work has been supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland, Socrates Erasmus, Arts & Humanities Research Council and British Council and has been shown worldwide. She was recently awarded a Belfast Media Group’s Top 40 Under 40 award www.sineadodonnell.com Sylvette Babin holds a Masters degree in Open Media from Concordia University, Montreal City, where she lives and works. She has been working in performance since 1997 and has shown her work internationally. Sylvette is particularly interested in site-specific work and her performances and installations evoke certain physical emotional states using strategies and devices that involve the body, absurd situations or visual and sound play.Mariel Carranza is a Peruvian born, Los Angeles based artist. Using her body as sculpture in her performances, Mariel challenges conventional notions of time, space, and the corporeal. She works from intuition, viscerally responding and attempting to reach an understanding of events occurring throughout the world. She uses time, space, textiles and actions as material from which to create her performances and attempts transcendental experiences through labour and intensively focused actions.Paul Couillard has been working as an artist, curator and cultural theorist since 1985, focusing on performance art with forays into installation and various new media. He has created more than 200 solo and collaborative performance works in 21 countries. His work seeks to build community and address trauma through explorations of our bodies as vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge and spirit. He has a particular interest in considering the shared borders of our separate existences, searching for a language that can convey complex layers of personal history and cultural specificity while questioning the notion of shared or universal experience.  His solo practice is often focused on duration and the effects of time.Poshya Kakil is one of the most progressive young female performance artists currently working in Kurdistan-Iraq. Poshya graduated from the College of Fine Arts in Erbil in 2009 and her art deals directly with her identity as a Kurdish woman living in Iraq. Her performance work is about her living reality and reflects systems of kinship, gender, religion, barriers and borders. Painting, design, words, poems and drawing all contribute to how she develops her ideas into live actions. Despite geographical, cultural and border restrictions, she continues to collaborate with artists working in performance all over the world. In Kurdistan-Iraq, she has made a series of performance actions and films such as Knitting Iron, a film made at the women’s jail in Erbil supported by the Ministry of Youth and Culture.Shiro Masuyama studied architecture at Meiji University, Kawasaki, Japan where he became interested in the intersection of architecture and art and involving people in his work. He uses motifs drawn from popular culture such as money, sex, office workers mass media and cigarettes and places an emphasis on making functional, architectural works that are approachable and easy to interact with. Shiro’s work has been described as ‘interventionist’ and ‘interactive’ and aims to draw the attention of people who have no prior connection to the world of art. He describes his work as four-dimensional and only complete when those who view it become involved as this ‘fourth dimension’ and an integral part of the work.For further information please contact Lyn Sheridan or Paul McCarthy at Aiken PR on Belfast 02890663000 or firstname@aikenpr.com